Ben Okri Quotes

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.

Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.

People's talk and the stories they tell have been engraved on my heart, and some of them have flown into my pen.

The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this; we are the only creature that tells stories, and sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. Then there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation and family and clan and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

I think story-telling is innate in human beings, it's something that we've done since we scrawled across cave walls.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

I like mythology - anything historical.

There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

Fairly tales are myths, and myths are only myths because there's a grain of truth in them.